Flora Warren Seymour


Flora Warren Seymour was an American lawyer and author. She was appointed as the first woman member of the Board of Indian Commissioners by President Warren G. Harding.

Biography

Flora Warren Seymour was born as Flora Warren Smith in Cleveland, Ohio, to Eleanor De Forest and Charles Payne Smith.
She spent the majority of her childhood in the Washington D.C. area. She received her B.A. degree, Davis Prize in oratory, Enosinian Society from George Washington University LL. B. degree from Washington College of Law and LL. M. degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Career

She was at the Indian Service while completing her degrees.
In 1916, she was admitted to the Illinois bar. She worked as a lawyer in Chicago.
In 1919, she was admitted to the practice of law before the United States Supreme Court.
"Several former commissioners, such as Flora Warren Seymour and Dr. C.C. Lindquist, continued to oppose Collier and his reform agenda."

On 5 October 1922, Flora Warren Seymour was appointed to the Board of Indian Commissioners.
"Such a proposition implies that while Menominees are not to be trusted individually with a farm apiece, for fear they will lose it, they can collectively be given not only the land, but the management of large power and timber interests, the running of a big sawmill, with the railroad and other activities it entails. Out of nineteen hundred incapacities is to arise a great super-capacity. The whole is to be several times the sum of its parts. The mere statement of this proposition indicates its impractionbility." - Flora Warren Seymour

Many of Seymour's books were about Native Americans.
"White women appointees to the Indian Bureau during the Gilded Age like Florence Etheridge and Flora Warren leveraged maternalistic guardianship over Native peoples into potent examples of civic authority for the women’s suffrage movement. By contrast, some Native employees like Gertrude Bonnin, a Sioux woman, became staunch defenders of tribal sovereignty and cultural autonomy."

She was, for a time, the editor of Quest magazine and the assistant editor of the Women Lawyers Journal.

Order of Bookfellows

With her husband she helped found the Order of Bookfellows - a Chicago-based literary society and then served as its executive head. She also helped publish and edit its organ, the monthly magazine The Step-Ladder from 1919 through 1943, which featured prose and poetry by its members.
In 1928, The Step Ladder offered three poetry prizes: the George Sterling Memorial Prize; the Sperling Sonnet Prize; and the Jeannette Chappel Competition.
Notable members of the Order of Bookfellows include: Esther Nelson Karn, Elizabeth Anne Wells Cannon, Frederick Starr, Elkanah East Taylor, and Grace Porterfield Polk.

Personal life

In 1915, she married George Steele Seymour, an author, an assistant general auditor, who joined the Pullman Co. in 1910, and was a member of the Illinois bar.
She lived at 431 S. Dearborn St., 5529 Dorchester Ave., and 4917 Blackstone Avenue in Chicago. She died in Chicago on December 10, 1948.

Works

Plays

  • Books

  • William De Morgan, a Post-Victorian Realist
  • The Five Civilized American Indian Tribes
  • The Story of the Sioux Indians
  • The Indians of the Pueblos
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  • The Boys' Life of Frémont
  • The Boys' Life of Kit Carson
  • Women of Trail and Wigwam
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  • The Story of the Red Man
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  • We Called Them Indians
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    Articles

  • "Land Titles in the Pueblo Indian Country", American Bar Association Journal. Vol. 10, No.1, 1924. p. 37.
  • "Burlesquing the American Indian", Woman Lawyers' Journal. Vol. 13, No.2, 1924. pp. 3–6.
  • "Report on the Mescalero Indian Reservation, New Mexico," June 6, 1932, BIA, vol. 10
  • "Indian Service Educational Activities in the Southwest," July 28, 1932, BIA, vol. 10